Cohocton native's The Paradiso Files’ gets rave reviews

Wednesday

Tim Burke — a Cohocton native — has picked up the pen to tell the story of Lenny “The Quahog” Paradiso, whom he prosecuted in the death of a young woman from East Boston named Marie Iannuzzi.

It was 25 years ago that Tim Burke, then working in the Suffolk County (Mass.) District Attorney’s office, encountered a case that changed his life.

Now, Burke — a Cohocton native — has picked up the pen to tell the story of Lenny “The Quahog” Paradiso, whom he prosecuted in the death of a young woman from East Boston named Marie Iannuzzi. He doesn’t believe Paradiso’s acts were solely against Iannuzzi, however, he thinks “The Quahog” may have killed as many as seven women, assaulting numerous others. In “The Paradiso Files —?Boston’s Unknown Serial Killer,” Burke sets the stage for his prosecution of Paradiso by relaying the facts of assaults committed by him in the mid- to late-70s, leading up to the case building against him for Iannuzzi’s death. It also offers Burke’s theory that “The Quahog” was responsible for the disappearance and death of Joan Webster, who stepped off a plane at Boston’s Logan Airport in 1981 never to be seen again, that became a major news story at that time.

It was Burke’s relationship with Webster’s parents that led him to write the recently-released book, his first.

“I had met Joan Webster’s parents 25 years ago when the case was first coming to the forefront,” Burke said. “I’ve known them for all that time, and they visited my house two summers ago.

“They’ve been involved with Parents of Murdered Children, and it’s important for those parents to know as much about what happened to their children as they can,”?he added. “I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I felt it was an interesting case and a lot of things were undisclosed about Paradiso.”

There is no change in Burke’s feeling about Paradiso’s guilt or innocence.

“I think he’s responsible for the deaths of a lot of other women,”?he said. “I hope this book may have brought some closure to people whose children were victimized by him.”

He approached writing as an every day job — on top of his already daily job of being a lawyer. Nonetheless, Burke said he found time to write a little each day.

“You have to get in the chair and sit in front of the computer and get it out,” he said. “The hardest thing is staring at a blank page trying to figure out where you might want to go with a certain paragraph. Getting it out can be very difficult at times."

“I?could write and produce four finished pages in a 16-hour day, or I could sit there for the same amount of time and get just half a page,” Burke added. “It depends on the flow and whether you’re feeling satisfied with your writing.”

Even though he lived the case, Burke said there still was a lot of research to be done about the historical background.

“I tried to work music and history into the chapter themes to give people a sense of the themes going on at the time,” he said. “I?also tried to give a sense of what the law is like, in theory and in the reality of how it’s applied. I?tried to combine all those things.”

Music definitely helped set the scene, especially the ones in Burke’s office, as the radio was always on and the songs were very varied. And it’s not just a plot device, he does have music as the background for his day-to-day activities.

“I still do it, in fact I had to turn it down before I called for this interview,” he said.

The book takes place in Boston, but Cohocton does get a mention —?on pages 218-219 — as Burke describes what his hometown is like and gives a glimpse at what inspired his path in life. He recounts the story of a man named Derby Smith who owned a bar in town and killed his wife in April 1961.

“I felt it was important as a writer to tell the reader where I came from, in Cohocton there was no crime in terms of that kind of excitement,” Burke said. “So, when that case occurs, it was a big deal back then, and somewhere along the line it did create an impression on me.

“I?have very fond memories of Cohocton. When talking to Drew (Trooper Andrew Palombo, who worked many cases with Burke), he was a city kid and always interested in where I was from, what it was like and how different it was from the stuff we were dealing with.”

His visits home aren’t as frequent as when his parents were alive, Burke said, but he still does get back, often to take in one of his brother’s — Prattsburgh Central School boys’ basketball coach Jim Burke — basketball team’s games.

“I?like to come back to watch Jimmy’s games,”?he said. “It’s usually the playoffs.”

Practicing law every day, plus the adding task of writing on a daily basis, keeps him pretty busy.

“I?don’t sleep much, I don’t go to sleep until about 2 in the morning,” Burke said when asked how he fits it all in. “I never needed a whole lot of sleep and at that time of the night the phone usually isn’t ringing.”

The first book of Burke’s career already has led to a second in the works — this one centering around three female clients he had after he left the DA’s office. He said their cases coincide around the same time period — one whose 13-year-old son died at Children’s Hospital of Boston, another whose Boston police officer husband had been murdered during a drug raid and the killer went free, and the third about a woman raped by a serial rapist.

“I went back to the DA’s office to prosecute that one,” Burke said of the last case. “It’s about the cases and how they intermesh.

“I didn’t set out to do this, but the first book has women as victims, while the second book is really about women overcoming tragedies in their lives. That wasn’t by design, but it seems like now that I’m halfway through the second one, that’s how it’s coming along.”

He expects the follow-up tome to be published in about another eight months.

It’s not known what Paradiso thought of Burke’s first book — nine days after it was released, he died in jail.

The Evening Tribune

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